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SCO Receives Nasdaq's Delisting Notice
An anonymous reader writes "This somewhat amusing press release of sorts tells us one of those things we've all been waiting a while for. SCO(X) has announced that 'it received a Nasdaq Staff Determination letter on December 21, 2007 indicating that as a result of having filed for protection under Chapter 11 of the U.S. Bankruptcy Code, the Nasdaq Listing Qualifications Panel has determined to delist the company's securities from the Nasdaq Stock Market and will suspend trading of the securities effective at the open of business on Thursday, December 27, 2007.' PJ at Groklaw has surmised that with effectively zero cash resources left, Novell doesn't stand to get much more than SCO's furniture, if even that.
Ding dong, is the wicked witch finally dead yet?"
Some of my favorite quotes from Darl McBride: "And C++ programming languages, we own those, have licensed them out multiple times, obviously. We have a lot of royalties coming to us from C++." "Obviously Linux owes its heritage to UNIX, but not its code. We would not, nor will not, make such a claim." "We didn't start this, but we're going to finish it."
SCO substantially slowed the use of Linux in corporations by suing IBM in 2003 and threating businesses with their own lawsuits if they used Linux. Their claims were on legally shaky ground and it was obvious to anyone who looked at the short "infringing" code samples that leaked out that their case was based on either gross incompetence or downright fraud. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SCO_v._IBM has a good summary of how that played out on the legal+technical side.
In addition to what greg1104 said it should be noted that SCO already had prior history with patent/copyright trolling. Based on their previous history it was fairly obvious that they hoped the lawsuit they brought against IBM would be settled quickly out of court rather than having to actually defend their ludicrous claims earning them a quick cash infusion for little actual work. When IBM failed to roll over and instead bit back they got caught trying to prove the un-provable, but continued to insist all along that they were right while tossing out every excuse they could come up with to buy time. They probably would have been dead in the water long ago, but it seems that Microsoft and various parties (strongly suspected to be Microsoft shills) bought ridiculous numbers of bogus "licenses" from SCO to help shore up SCOs bank account. Of course after many long years of SCO screaming their fool head off that they own Linux (among many other stupid claims) they've finally been beaten into the smear on the concrete that we all knew they were to begin with. This is merely the final act where they get the hose out and wash them into the gutter.
Curiosity was framed, Ignorance killed the cat.
For those of you who don't follow this mess, SCO voluntarily went into bankruptcy in September, the day before the SCO vs. Novell trial was to start. This stopped that case. For about two months. Novell asked the bankruptcy judge to let their case continue. After frantic maneuvers from SCO, which went nowhere, the bankruptcy judge let the Novell case proceed. It will go to trial in January or February. The only remaining issue there is how much money SCO owes Novell. SCO already lost on the "who owns UNIX copyrights" issue; Novell owns them.
The IBM and Red Hat cases are still pending, so if anybody wants to buy up SCO (the company's entire market cap is only $2.4 million today), they'd be stuck with those potential liabilities, on top of the Novell liability. That's why nobody is snapping up the remains of the company.
Plan on visiting the liquidation auction some time next summer.